A national disgrace

Since January 2018 there have been 141 cases of rape recorded against minor boys and girls, with no convictions so far

A set of figures has emerged from Lahore that ought to be a matter of shame for every person in the country. That there is no public outcry is a reliable indicator of the moral decay that sits at the national heart. Since January 2018 there have been 141 cases of rape recorded against minor boys and girls and there has not been a single conviction to date. In every case brought before the courts the accused have been granted bail. Predatory paedophiles have been released back into the communities where they committed their alleged offences with no check or balance, no follow-up and no monitoring.

Sex crimes against children are on the rise, and this is now a documented reality not an ill-informed assumption. Child sexual abuse, even after the widely-publicised Kasur incident is unchecked and allowed to thrive courtesy of poor investigation by the police and flawed prosecutions. Sex crimes against children are not a priority for the police, and where there is any attempt to hold the police accountable such offences do not feature in the minds or actions of those tasked with monitoring and effectiveness. Of wider concern is the apathy of the population at large. There is often a protest in the immediate aftermath of any incident but it quickly dies away. There is no political mileage in child sex abuse and none of the political parties has committed to seeking its reduction.

The cases now in the public domain are the tip of the iceberg. It is impossible to know how many cases go unreported every year. Many of these happen within the family. Indeed global statistics show that most children know their abuser. There is a national tolerance of child sexual abuse that has reached the point where it is normative, a gross perversion of the understanding of deviancy, an inability to separate right from wrong. Pakistan is content to allow its children to be abused, violated, raped and murdered. If that is not a national disgrace we don’t know what is.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 11^th, 2018.

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